Work with document files either imported from programs like MS Word, Excel and other office tools or created natively in formats like ODF or PDF compatible with modern and open standards. Editing, copying and incorporating data in databases is possible.
LibreOffice is an open-source free alternative to heavy commercial office suites like MS Office. While having generally the same functionality, LibreOffice is more open to modification and updates, making it a more attractive suite if you want a comfortable and adjustable tool for working with documentation.
LibreOffice consists of several tools capable of working with documents of any type, from standard Word files and Excel tables to presentations and Publisher files. There's a word processing and desktop publishing tool called Writer; spreadsheet program Calc; tool for creating effective multimedia presentations called Impress; a sketching tool named Draw; database manager Base; formula editor Math; advanced chart and diagram creator Charts. Every tool has all the features of an advanced editor for the kind of files you could work with. The tools work stable and fast, they are easy to use even if you're not an experienced user of office tools.
LibreOffice adds several unique features into its programming, such as the support for ODT documents and the ability to incorporate various plugins and extensions. You can always add new templates for various documents.
Open-source tools sometimes disappoint by being attempts to copy a licensed product. LibreOffice is different in that, it's a genuinely good product itself.
v7.0 [Jul 7, 2020]
Writer:
- Implemented a padded numbering in Writer's lists. More info in a first blog post and in a second blog post
- Actually not limited to lists; e.g., page numbering may also use padding.
- Bookmarks and Fields can now be protected to prevent accidental changes to them.
- Fix in Mail merge: progress is not updated during export of many files tdf#133270.
- Improved rotated text handling in Writer's table rows with automatic height. More info in this blog post.
- Implemented support for semi-transparent text in Writer. More info in this blog post.
- Bookmarks can now be displayed in-line in the text, controlled by Standard Toolbar ▸ Toggle Formatting Marks and Tools ▸ Options... ▸ LibreOffice Writer ▸ Formatting Aids ▸ Bookmarks tdf#45589 core commit 4ce8120f1 core commit 04405edc3.
- Empty input fields were completely invisible and now they are highlighted with grey background too tdf#101830.
Navigator:
- Navigator's categories are gray if they don't have any items.
- All objects in Navigator (Headings, Tables, Frames, Images, etc.) have own context menu items like Go To, Edit, Delete, Rename.
- Headings in Navigator have Promote/Demote level and Promote/Demote chapter context menu items.
- Table's context menu in Navigator now has Insert caption item.
- Added Outline tracking for Headings in Navigator. It can be in three states: Default, Focus, Off. Try clicking with your mouse in several places in your big text document with many headings. You'll see that Headings in Navigator will be selected automatically according to text cursor position.
- Replaced the navigation toolbox with the navigate by elements control.
- Added Navigator section tooltip word and character count.
AutoCorrect:
- Improved usage of quotation marks and apostrophe in several languages.
- Replace ASCII apostrophe with typographic apostrophe (’) in Czech, German, Icelandic, Slovak and Slovene instead of second level quotation mark (‘) outside of second level quotation.
Calc:
- New spreadsheet functions: RAND.NV() and RANDBETWEEN.NV() non-volatile random number generating functions that are not recalculated on every input like RAND() and RANDBETWEEN() are. tdf#127831 (Eike Rathke (Red Hat, Inc.))
- Changed spreadsheet functions:
- Functions that allow using regular expressions now correctly honor case-insensitivity flags (?i) / (?-i) in the expression. Note that the default case-sensitivity of the functions is not changed; the affected functions: AVERAGEIF, AVERAGEIFS, COUNTIF, COUNTIFS, HLOOKUP, LOOKUP, MATCH, SEARCH, SUMIF, SUMIFS, VLOOKUP are case-insensitive by default, so the sensitivity only changes after first (?-i) in the regular expression tdf#78840 (Mike Kaganski, Collabora)
- TEXT() now allows the second argument to be an empty format string for interoperability with other implementations. If the first argument is numeric or a text string that could be converted to a number (according to formula detailed settings) then an empty string is returned. If the first argument is a text string that can not be converted to number then that text string is returned. In previous releases an empty format string always results in Err:502 (invalid argument) error. tdf#131536 (Eike Rathke (Red Hat, Inc.))
- OFFSET() optional 4th parameter (Width) and 5th parameter (Height) now must be greater than 0 if given, otherwise the result is Err:502 (invalid argument) error. In previous releases a negative argument value was silently taken as value 1, which does not comply with the specification and other implementations. tdf#85551 (Eike Rathke (Red Hat, Inc.))
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